Realism is “that which does not shrink from the commonplace (although
art dreads the commonplace) or from the unpleasant (although the aim of
art is to give pleasure) in its effort to depict things as they are,
life as it is” (229) and is used “in opposition to conventionalism, to
idealism, to the imaginative, and to sentimentalism” (222). Bliss Perry

Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are
apparently the most ordinary anduninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value
and true meaning. In short, realism reveals.Where we thought nothing worth of
notice, it shows everythingto be
rife with significance. George Parsons Lathrop, 'The Novel and its
Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874): 313‑24.

Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The
charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a
measuring-worm. --Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

I found . . . that to do full justice to Mark Twain as a human being
would require a thesis so detailed, learned and spacious that there is
no time for it to-night.

He and you will rejoice in this, I am sure, for thus is, at least
temporarily, averted that fatal result which was intimated in a recent
English school examination where it was distinctly stated by one of the
contestants that "in the United States people are put to death by
elocution.“

“We hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common,
average man . . . .will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds
it . . . Because it is not like a real grasshopper”--W. D. Howells, 1887

We invite our novelists, therefore, to concern themselves with the more
smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the
universal in the individual rather than in the commonplace.” –W. D.
Howells, 1886

He is animated by a love of the common, the immediate, the familiar and
vulgar elements of life, and holds that in proportion as we move into
the rare and strange we become vague and arbitrary; That truth of
representation, in a word, can be achieved only so long as it is in our
power to test and measure it.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without
incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense
sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads,
suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne
particle in its tissue

A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other
organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that
in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his
donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and
the novel of incident . . . . It appears to me as little to the point as
the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance- to
answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels,
as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only
distinction in which I see any meaning. . .

Romance beside his unstrung lute,
Lies stricken mute.
The old-time fire, the antique grace,
You will not find them anyplace,
Polemic, scientific air:
We strip Illusion of her veil;
We vivisect the nightingale
To probe the secret of his note.
The Muse in alien ways remote
Goes wandering.

“A large number of readers, who have wearied of minute descriptions of
the commonplace, are to-day often found condemning an author who does
not keep his hero in imminent danger of death through at least
seventy-five percent of his pages.“--John Kendrick Bangs, 1898